Human Rights Politics

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in US prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax", California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners.

The award-winning author of The Eichmann Trial and Denial: Holocaust History on Trial gives us a penetrating and provocative analysis of the hate that will not die, focusing on its current, virulent incarnations on both the political right and left: from white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, to mainstream enablers of antisemitism such as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, to a gay pride march in Chicago that expelled a group of women for carrying a Star of David banner.

A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel.

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, essayist, pamphlet writer, Unitarian, abolitionist, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the 19th century. He was a strong advocate of the labor movement and severely anti-authoritarian and individualist in political views. Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808, and died on May 14, 1887, in Boston.

In May 1963, news photographer Charles Moore was on hand to document the Children’s Crusade, a civil rights protest. But the photographs he took that day did more than document an event; they helped change history.

Catch the Jew! recounts the adventures of gonzo journalist Tuvia Tenenbom, who wanders around Israel and the Palestinian Authority for seven months in search of the untold truths in today's Holy Land. With holy chutzpah, Tenenbom boldly goes where no Jew has gone before, at times risking his life as he assumes the identities of Tobi the German and even Abu Ali in order to probe into the many stories in this strange land and poke holes in all of them.

Dr. Montgomery served as director of studies at the prestigious International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. France for three years. For thirteen years he has integrated biblical theology and human rights through a summer program in Strasbourg. Learn why only a serious biblical theology can supply the foundations for human rights in our world.

This definitive account of the battle for reproductive freedom includes a bold new strategy to safeguard our rights, from two lawyers at the forefront of the movement.

This eye-opening collection presents three of Paine’s most important writings, providing modern listeners with both an inspiring glimpse into the past and compelling philosophical arguments concerning deism, human rights, egalitarianism, and independence. As a man who faced prison, ostracizing, and constant ridicule for his beliefs and criticisms, Thomas Paine is a testament to resilience and standing up for what you believe in.

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a "great replacement" of the world's white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America, and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements.

South Africa's story is often presented as a triumph of new over old, but while formal apartheid was abolished decades ago, stark and distressing similarities persist. Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh explores the edifice of systemic racial oppression—the new apartheid—that continues to thrive, despite or even because of our democratic system.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had a profound influence on the shape of 19th-century thought and political discourse. His view of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to the unrestricted state. Mill favoured decentralised forms of socialism because he thought that a centralised model would discourage competition, neglect talent, and disregard freedom.

Revelations about U.S. policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. Within this context, Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics, and prison. Throughout, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy compromised by its racist origins and institutions.

Through the stories of three remarkable individuals who share how they fell victim to traffickers and how their bodies and souls resisted an enterprise of total destruction, Monique Villa takes us around the world - from Ohio to Tokyo, London to India, Qatar to Colombia - to uncover a parallel world where men, women, and children are dehumanized and reduced to obedient machines. Written by a global leader in the fight against human trafficking, this powerful book uncovers the hidden world of slaves - no longer in physical chains - who walk among us, trapped in a cycle of exploitation.

In a story that has never been told, Going to the Mountain tells the tale of how Nelson Mandela steered his grandson Ndaba from his reckless youth (shirking school, fighting in gangs) to his maturation into a fully realized and principled adulthood - all as an often-single parent in his years after political imprisonment and through his landmark presidency of South Africa. On a scale both intimate and epic, the book will detail the gripping arc of Ndaba's own extraordinary journey, which mirrors that of South Africa's.

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women.

The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.

The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and knew from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God."

Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa. With unprecedented access, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature.